Vidhwansak
by Jack Mackerel
Summary: Unobtanium is crucial to humanity's survival. In light of this, a second expedition is gathered by a multi-corporate endeavor, back to the planet where RDA had failed, a more alien, hostile world since the last human had left its noxious jungles.
1. Preface

**FOREWORD/PREFACE/WHATEVER THE FUCK**

I'll admit: I'm a dirty, dirty global warming skeptic.

I'm also not terribly fond of the Green movement – all hype and half-arsed corporate attempts at suckering in armchair environmentalists.

And I knew I'd be slapping myself over watching Avatar, especially when it was predictable to the point that a ten-year-old would have known the ending. (actually, the movie reviews kinda spoiled it for me, but there was nothing to spoil.)

Now, I know I'm not easily moved by CGI (usually, I can pick out what's fake and what's not), but this film's efforts, while still obviously fake(ish), were pretty... cool, for lack of a better word.

But the story still bothered me (starting with Jake rejecting his humanity, Quaritch and Selfridge showing a bit more depth than their 2D-ness, the Na'vi not wanting to share and lack of reason as to why people began opening fire (it's better explained in the script, yes), and Unobtanium being of extreme worth to the human race).

So, I decided to make a story subverting all that.

And here's my product, obviously still in progress. I'm not big on the whole serial updating thing (I prefer to have a story finished when I read it, especially when I'm a person who obsessively edits stories two years after he first wrote up five pages), but I'm afraid I'm using it here. It's also not perfect, since I'm also those sort of people who write shitty stories and spend more than a year editing it, still thinking it's not up to par.

**BUT**, seeing as this is my first real publication on , think of it as an experiment.

Feel free to MST or leave flaming, snarky reviews. It'll probably deserve it.

(Yes, Cordell Lovecraft is a backstory character from Pandorapedia. Seeing as it can be edited by anyone, it's probably fanon or just a joke done by a random fan. Telepathy, ridiculous as it is, is also used for the Avatar program.)


	2. Chapter 1

Sometimes, Blake Norton would wake up and feel an itch on his legs, only to rake at the pathetic prosthetics that barely even qualified as limbs. He'd be reduced to a state of gibbering tears back then, tearing apart his dingy little apartment that he managed to scrape by on veteran's benefits, leaving holes in the plasticrete walls until the joints and bone fragments in his hands stirred him out of his frenzy.

Now, he just sat and stared. Maybe he'd cry a bit, but tears were so fucking ineffective – he'd want to hit himself for it. He wasn't some pussy, he was a _Marine,_ goddammit – not some pansy shit who went to tears over a failing grade or something equally stupid. Pogues and hippies cried.

Before, in the slums of Brazil and the deserts of Mexico, his squadmates had cheered him on for that sort of no-nonsense attitude - "Hardass" was his nickname. Any giggles or mocking from the pogues quickly disappeared when he lead his troops quickly and efficiently – with a lack of casualties, even on near-suicidal missions. Whiskey hiding out in the jungle? Sniffed out and burned by the end of the day. Whiskey taking potshots at them from some greaseball cliff, with machine guns and sawed-off Arubas pointed everywhere? That day, not one was shot when they abseiled down and tossed the pigs to the canyon floor out of their hidey-holes. Charges over mud in rainy weather, defending factories from cobbled-together Vipers – didn't matter. He was a model Marine.

Was. Until some Whiskey behanchod launched a mag device at his Scorpion. The rest of the day was spent lying in a MASH gurney, staring at the red wet things that had used to be joints and tendons. The wounds still felt as if the turbine just peeled away his leg like an orange yesterday.

Now, there was nothing else. "Oh, you're a great commander, how's a desk job?" He'd take Whiskey tearing his guts out for info over becoming a desk pogue. "Don't worry, the civilian sector likes people who have proved themselves on the battlefield!" Maybe for logistic ivans, and especially not for commanders in what was universally regarded as a "bad war". Fucking liberals! They hand his country over to the triple-as, and now they let Whiskey run up and down over South America, letting their socialist friends screw over the civilian population! Even the _cops_ didn't want to look him straight in the eye, as if he was some sort of child molester!

Now there was nothing but the big telescreen that took up his wall, spewing corpie propaganda day and night, worrying if the IRS didn't suck away the rest of his vet's benefits.

* * *

On the other hand, Craig Daniels was much more adjusted and decidedly less hateful.

No scars, no injuries. The shrinks were amazed when he had come out of the worst fighting in Chile for two weeks, with no backup and nearly no ammo, without turning into a shellshocked wreck. His commanders were just as astonished – slapping him with honors falling short of Distinguished Crosses. _He _was the most amazed of all – why him? Hardass Norton and the rest of the crew didn't like him – polite, didn't think much of "Whiskey", as they called the Revolutionary Socialist Movement that had ate up most of South America, and hadn't even killed a man until there was no one else around to slap him on the back and congratulate him. Separated from his squad, occasionally running into some newbie and teaming up, only for that guy to have his head spectacularly blown off in front of him, praying that the nightly mortar barrages didn't leave him an unidentifiable pile of gore in the morning. If he had his way, all the dead guys would get a medal and not him. Hell, he'd admit (albeit only to himself and his closest friends, all of them six feet deep) he wasn't much of a Marine, let alone a soldier – he was still thinking he should have gone into the Army for programming instead, but he liked testing himself.

So, after the media circus ended, and he got a firing range named after him, RDA bullied him into becoming some elite tin man or something similarly stupid. No, thanks. He found having to look at men ripped apart by K-Lash projectiles was enough. At least they were accommodating, even after they sent some juiced-up roider to drag him up to the Chief's office, to try and "threaten" him with security work in the arse-end of the moon. He _very_ much liked that, still savoring the bewildered look on the RDA Chief of Security on Mare Vitrium when he told him that the offer was adequate. The pay wasn't bad, and the sights were even better, savoring the view of Earth and the lunar cities. People usually kept to themselves, and aside from helping a new salaryman or visitor out of a restricted area, there wasn't much to do. Everything would grate after a while, though, and he'd eventually be too brittle, even with grav-sims on the buildings, to return to Earth after a while, without expensive-ass therapy, but that was fine and dandy – RDA wouldn't let any decorated hero turn to an arthritic old man.

In the distance, more ships twinkled and flared off to carry materials to the half-finished spiral rising out of a cloaked Africa, amidst the "Space Elevator". Ridiculous. RDA could make telepathy and clone pervo aliens that kinda looked like his cat, but this was just stupid. Even dumber than what that behanchod did on Pandora – already, they were laying off everyone for what they cost him. Hadn't anyone thought to grab some unop... opn... whatever it was before the pervo cat-things kicked them out? Served that trog right.

Maybe they'd get one with working neurons and send 'droids down. No mess, no fuss, no fucking greens turning on their squaddies and killing everyone.

"...Hey, Craig. Stop daydreaming."

Vox/Neural implants were such a pain in the ass sometime. Even in this day and age, it felt... _weird_ to see people talking to themselves and getting a "feeling" from one another.

"I think you're in trouble. RDA sent another suit down here, and he looks absolutely volcanic. You sure you didn't violate any airlock proceedures?"

Ha, ha. Oh-so-very-funny. Craig didn't answer. His shift partner was playing grabass _somewhere_, and now he'd get another chewing out for something he didn't do.

* * *

Ned Littletree wasn't much of a soldier.

He had entertained the idea for a bit, skirting the recruiting station near the trash they called "public schools" and pestering sign-ups on their opinions, before dismissing it permanently – the idea of getting his skinny ass kicked in boot camp, when even weaker individuals wiped the floor with him (literally) back in high school, wasn't a pleasant thought. Let alone entering combat, especially when he couldn't deal with his first major hurdle: writing a thesis. They later found him gibbering and sobbing in the swimming pool about molecular bonds and writing DNA code over and over on the walls in his ejac-

...Anyway, biology was a much better calling. After dropping out of med school and, by a huge stroke of luck, meeting an old professor, who promptly inducted him into RDA, and by an even larger stroke of luck, got a pass into the Avatar program (back then, "Dark Dreamer"), when it was still just rapists culled from Death Row and a bunch of angry chimps who liked to fling shit everywhere at the slightest provocation. Oh, sure, he was a med school dropout – he still remembered the semi-amusing stares of disapproval when he first marched into the control room that day, and Lovecraft talking to him like he was some sort of treehugging, animal-fucking greenie liberal too lazy to even hold a scalpel – but time went on, and offhand insults and sarcasm turned to grudging approval or, even better, ignorance.

Lovecraft used to tell everyone that their work would be laughed off as ridiculous and fabricated, some sort of publicity stunt by RDA. Littletree had nearly walked off the job when one of research members told him what he was blathering about: telepathy. It still sounded like a load of bullshit, even to this day, after he had read the blueprints and experienced "telepathy" for himself. The machines, when they wanted a larger range to "connect" to the subjects, had been wireless. They acted like a "wireless router" (for lack of a better metaphor - they were completely obsolete at this point) for the bodies, but did something with your brain waves... or something like that. He wasn't particularly good at explaining how it exactly worked. Anyway, this allowed you to communicate with whatever they had been been screwing around with. This, coupled with the fact that creatures, whose only connection with humans was that their ancestors came from the sea, were controllable, meant that this project would be a research goldmine - not to mention they'd all be protected from getting laid off.****_**  
**_

Until he'd been kicked off the project when the Dark Dreamer program quickly went nowhere after that. Sure, it was wonderful for the scientific world, but who else have a use for it? Mining companies only needed robots, not corpses or expensive-to-grow animals made from scratch that required constant food and maintainable, where robots, refined to an art, could clean and repair themselves. They didn't need food, or water, or fresh air, or even joints or a skeletal system - any mining 'bot destroyed could be replaced easily. Any use DD had in warfare was negated by the fact that a fallen corpse had to have the right sort of circumstances to be controlled by someone else – and those circumstances couldn't be met on _any_ battlefield. The telepathic properties only worked within a certain range and required large, heavy, machinery that sputtered and died if it was taken out of a sealed, sterile environment. More and more people began to turn against the project when human and animal rights groups had kicked up a storm about the whole thing. The final nail in the coffin was Doc Lovecraft getting arrested after PETA (fucking PETA of all things!) finally won a lawsuit against him and against the RDA, closing off some loopholes that allowed them their work. It was back to growing chimera pets for upper-classmen and their spoiled kids for everyone else, and they were only lucky RDA was willing to take them back. If it had been Liandri or another Triple-A Corp, they'd been tossed into the same cell as Lovecraft!

The new job was like a person who'd been used to fine cutlery and clothes being forced to use jeans and plastic forks. He'd been playing with State-Of-The-Art crap for much too long, and the jump from $90 Billion-plus equipment to the bare minimum required for organism production was a shock. At least it gave him time to think. He wasn't angry at RDA for re-opening the project, sans original team, when Pandora was discovered, and managing to create the first Na'Vi/Human hybrid _and_ making it drivable. If anything, he was astounded.

Who knew they'd make the transit to aliens so quickly? They were still having problems controlling fish and "biological constructions", little more than cloned pieces of brain, when he was kicked off the project. Na'Vi, within five years? No doubt they vivisected some poor bastard (if the herbert in charge wasn't off-grav, maybe a dissection from someone "accidentally" shot some native who'd gone to close to a jarhead.

"Doctor Littletree?"

He looked up from the gene gun. Severe, tall, pallid hair, pipe in mouth that violated several thousand restrictions on tobacco in a controlled environment, wearing a trenchcoat. RDA G-man, for sure.

"I apologize for the interruption." Not very sincere. "You are not in any legal trouble, but RDA wishes to discuss a very serious matter..."

* * *

The Greenies may zombie on about the destruction of the forests and whatnot, and the air quality shooting to lethal degrees, but that had been answered swiftly.

_Normally_, a low-ranking engineer from a rival company walking into a board room and saying that they could just grab a few blimps (okay, "airships" - no one except a few twenty-cent nerds knew what the Hell a twentieth-century blimp originally looked like) and spray the smog with chems would be arrested and tossed to the mercy of the Corporate Court, but at this point, people were desperate for anything. (Some Oregon town actually tried mass prayer. The lawsuits and angry internet flame wars that followed weren't pretty.) Turns out, this was surprisingly cheap and effective – no worries about smog clogging something, or wasting precious nitrate or oilix on aircars, or chewing up batteries for maglev or electric gizmos – just some helium, two guys in biohazard gear, and gallons of chems, give them thirty minutes of airtime, and WHAM! Fresh air. The chemicals were surprisingly uncomplicated to make, and the materials needed were easily available. (We're not going to bother with listing them.) There was the problem of the fact that it ate human flesh. Despite what the Greens told everyone, it wasn't a case of being turned into a puddle of flesh in a matter of minutes – even being submerged in the stuff wouldn't kill you unless you decided to enjoy your flesh dropping off by the hour. It was, however, excruciatingly painful if so much as a drop made contact with your skin – even worse if someone got a really good whiff of the stuff.

So, the streets were vacated of pedestrians, and only the occasional street cleaner shuffled past like a drunk hippo, lazily sweeping at the street to clear off some feral dog or cat lying in the street that didn't heed the warnings.

The Hanging Gardens came way before all this. After the last national park got burnt down by some ELF yahoos and Luddites (why would they do that? It made no sense), it didn't take long for the University of Virginia to build a biodome and fill it with cloned plants. It quickly become a tourist hotspot – people nostalgic of playing in the parks taking their kids, who thought "rose" was a sort of planet, to see all the myriad forms of life. The university was praised for being the first to bring plants back (in actually, they had beaten MIT, Columbus, and Stanford to the punch in building their dome. Why they hadn't start preparing since the Greenies blew the whistle when Earth's health got _reaaaally_ low back in 2070, please don't ask me), and there was a lack of need for exopaks shortly after. Other cities began playing follow the leader with this, and pretty soon, plant domes were all the rage, springing up in various locations. Air quality became slightly more tolerable, and people stopped killing themselves or each other due to the stress of urban life. (That's not really the point of this, however. If you wanted a discussion of psychological effects of living in a smoggy city, you should have read something else.)

In the very first Hanging Garden, which had quickly grown to more than two kilometers wide at the expense of several housing projects everyone for miles around was glad to be rid of, Ned Littletree sat on a bench, opposite of the G-man and some other suit he didn't recognize.

The other man was one of those older types – definitely a professor. Ned had been taught _not_ to stereotype, but people often couldn't drop the post-doc look. He'd dealt with a lot in the Dark Dreamer program. Always with the frosting hair, somewhat commanding features, gray here and there if it wasn't completely on his hair already. This one happened to be British, and his face sagged a lot – as if someone had used it for a basketball and didn't know how how to inflate it back up.

He was busy looking up, watching the cloned tropical birds sing and fight and take a crap on each other.

"Wonderful, isn't it?"

Oh, great. This was going to be a lecture.

"So tiny, and almost an insult to what had used to be our great wilderness. But it's a tiny step in the right direction." He smiled, lowering his face to meet with Ned's. "Doesn't measure up to Pandora, that's for sure."

No shit?

He sighed. "Pity Lovecraft got too big for his britches. Men like you could have done well on Pandora." Bullshit. They sent to best negotiator who single-handedly managed to calm down a Whiskey strike force – all of them hardcore commies who were spraying anything that looked corpie or yank in sight with APDS rounds – from ripping apart Detroit, and he got sent home in a body bag after a week of negotiations with the Na'vi. _Before_ they started shooting people on sight.

Ned, however, fearing that both men were some cops sniffing into the obviously unethical experiments he'd done for Dark Dreamer, kept his mouth zipped. He'd be lucky if they'd allow him a clean lawyer when they'd grav his ass to Corporate Court.

The man suddenly looked down, straight at him. The stare suddenly grew intense (as did the sagging). _Now_ he was going to get arrested.

"Let's cut the shit. RDA's got a new deal for you. You either can take it, or get wedged in for the rest of your life glitching with drek-quality animal parts for shit pay. Name a price, we'll give it to you. Don't try getting smart, either. You take it, you'll have to sever all ties with whatever connections you've got and move out of whatever meat-rack you call a home, but you'll get to play with SOTA crap. Don't go yakking off to your arse buddies about this, either."

Without bothering for the man to catch a breath, Ned spoke. "One million." Littletree wasn't particularly impressed with this "threat". Pimply fatasses in high school did a better job at making him wet his pants. Anyway, one million shouldn't be too bad. Hell, all he really needed was good food and an office that didn't look like some Communist concrete atrocity. In fact...

"And some food that doesn't taste like shrimp shit, and an office that doesn't make me want to kill myself from its sheer blandness." It _better_ be an office, and not a cubicle.

"Straight to the point. I like it." The man grinned, and Ned fought to roll his eyes. He had shark teeth implanted. Five cred said he was a lawyer. "Though, I doubt you'll be spending much time in an office," he said through gritted teeth.

* * *

He never should have voyaged far.

Oh, to illuminate the void that existed for eons, shrouding the dark pits of what the feeble-minded called the human brain, however infinitesimal, however accidental.

For the umpteenth time, distant, pleasant images rang in his ears and eyes. So long ago, almost primordial, it seemed, when he commanded so-called "bright" men and women for glimpses into the _things_ far beyond human understanding, so that they would be transcendent. Telepathy and remote control of biological creatures were so small-minded. Mind control could be next. Men could know more by idly observing through the eyes of another man, discreetly, with no fear of detection and its repercussions. Men could control a being engineered for whatever foolish human endeavor was needed – a brutish, muscled ape for aiding in lifting tremendous weights; a lithe bird-of-prey to soar above its prey and attack when it was critical; a soldier that could survive the lethal elements and still be able to do battle – why would there be a need for automatons, when organisms, easily repaired and grown, were the path to the future?

Alas, as a reminder of how feeble-minded men were, a punishment meted out for attempting to rise above gutless cretins that called themselves "scientists" and patted themselves on the back for discoveries so minute, they might as well not have existed at all. He made something worthwhile, making this miserable hulk one iota more important against the cosmos. They wrested control from him, giving it to some Indian fellow and a lady of ill temperament, to try and sully some savage men into control for Unobtanium. The precious metal, more than any organism. It would allow their race of sniveling apes to swim the void, for a chance at Godhood, to make their name amongst the stars and no longer be insignificant specks of assorted chemicals braining one another for pieces of dirt.

And they had failed. To equally insignificant specks. Man would never rise above the shroud of obscurity.

And here, he sat, confined to an eternity of deprivation, his only acquaintances a pen and some paper to write and improve on what could have been. No doubt his former employers had cast away his research, and if they had found his newest musings (he feared they may be obsolete, with his forced ignorance of the real world), they would be cast, too, to obscurity, prisoners never to be let out. He began to studiously take the papers to heart, where no amount of unwarranted beatings and torture would let out the secrets he held, but time marched endlessly, and he was certain this memorizing was based upon his self-delusion that he would ever be told to walk from his cell, to be amongst the apes and their huts of stone. Miracles did not happen in this world, and it would take one.

His cell door emitted a terrible sound, that of rusted gears, and a harsh, artificial light poured in...

* * *

Apparently, in prison, you still looked the same.

Even if he was missing the cheap vest and slacks, replaced with a bright-orange jumpsuit, Doctor Cordell Lovecraft still looked the same, as if he had been thrown into the cell just yesterday. He didn't bother glancing in the direction of Ned, who was standing with the RDA suit and the shark-toothed man (he gave his name as "Gladstone", and, supposedly, "that was all he needed to know", with a growl that sounded more like a weak chihuahua than an evil lawyer. It took all his strength to _not_ burst out into laughter). Apparently, they were positioned like this for some sort of ridiculous dramatic reason.

"Doctor Cordell Lovecraft. Please, please. Don't be alarmed."

Lovecraft ignored him, finishing off whatever he was scribbling on the wrinkled piece of paper. _Then_ stood up, a withered tree with a jumpsuit stretched like a garbage bag over him. Despite pining away in a plasticrete/steel cell, he, somehow, smelled faintly of artificial wood.

Gladstone spoke, his tone growing more and more hostile by the second. "RDA wants to make you an offer."


End file.
